Culture-to-Culture Image Translation and User Evaluation

The article introduces the concept of image ``culturization," i.e., defined as the process of altering the ``brushstroke of cultural features" that make objects perceived as belonging to a given culture while preserving their functionalities. First, we defined a pipeline for translating objects' images from a source to a target cultural domain based on state-of-the-art Generative Adversarial Networks. Then, we gathered data through an online questionnaire to test four hypotheses concerning the impact of images belonging to different cultural domains on Italian participants. As expected, results depend on individual tastes and preferences: however, they align with our conjecture that some people, during the interaction with an intelligent system, will prefer to be shown images modified to match their cultural background.